Big Girl Small

by Rachel Dewoskin

  “Judy was naked!” Mr. Grames says, and the video plays, the red dot of his pointer following the lines of my body like a bright bug crawling on me. “We can see here what happened.” And it’s so real I now can’t remember what the differences are between my nightmare video and the real one. They’re both appalling, me arching my back, turning to face Alan, huge on the wall of some dream courtroom, everyone looking at each other with their mouths open, like they’re about to drink my humiliation, devour me. Then a judge who looks just like Mr. Luther but isn’t him, says, “She was a virgin! It’s not her fault! She was a virgin! It didn’t count. It didn’t count. It didn’t count.”

  He says it just like that, three times, and then in the dream I put my head into my hands and Kyle gets up and he’s laughing, and he says no, she wasn’t, she’s a slut and why is everyone so surprised that she got drunk and gangbanged me and my friends?

  And then I stand up on top of a table, and the sheet feels like it might fall off, and I start to say no, no, I had sex with Kyle only three times and that was because I thought we were in love. But my throat closes, and my teeth are locked together so tight it feels like they might break. And I’m thinking, in the dream, my teeth are going to shatter and I can’t talk. So I stand there totally silent in my sheet, with my locked jaw. And even in the dream, where logic is all fucked up, the truth is so humiliating that I know on some level it’s better for everyone to think I was a willing participant. Because then I was just fun and crazy and doing my own thing, right? Rather than being violated? Then, when I finally risk opening my mouth, hoping to make this point, all my teeth start to fall out after all. And because I know the sheet will slip off if I move my arms, I keep them pinned at my sides and let my teeth spill down and bounce all over the desk like marbles. I don’t even bend to pick them up.

  I never fall asleep anymore without having some version of this dream. Sometimes, Mr. Troudeau, the AP history teacher, pounds a gavel until I put my hands over my ears. I look over at him, to say, please, stop, and it turns out he’s pounding his hips into the desk like he’s fucking the drawer. Then I look out at the audience and everyone is laughing. Ginger, Kyle, Alan, Chris, their moms, my mom, even Goth Sarah and Meghan—they’re all laughing that laugh and sticking their tongues out.

  Even though I keep having these dreams—or maybe because of them—I sleep so much at the Motel Manor that whenever I wake up, sometimes to the sound of someone knocking gently, I never know who or where I am. I can’t tell what’s a dream and what’s real. And in those utterly disoriented moments, I feel half happy. But then I remember reality, and I sink under thousands of gallons of water. I pull the covers back over my head and try to fall asleep again, because even though the dreams are terrible, I live for that one moment a day, when, between being asleep and being awake, I don’t remember. Even when I’m sure the knocking is real, I never answer the door.

  Sometimes, I get up and go out into the hallway to find Bill. I read papers Bill brings me, and spend hours watching TV. The news has been the only way for me to follow my own story, and I think this might be the definition of having an out-of-body experience, reading your own life, as misreported by people who know nothing about you. My third day here I read that D’Arts was “cooperating with an investigation by the state attorney’s office, interviewing parents and students close to the case.”

  By my fifth day, D’Arts was holding a “closed hearing.” According to the Detroit Free Press, “A tribunal named by the school board heard evidence on whether three male students, all seniors, acted inappropriately or broke the law by videotaping a fellow student at a party.” Someone named Caitlin Newbury, who is apparently the D’Arts lawyer, had the custodian “bar a reporter from attending the hearing.” What does “bar” mean? Did Mr. Nicks, the eighty-year-old janitor, have to shove a journalist out of D’Arts? Was the hearing held at school? Or in a courtroom like in my dream? And either way, didn’t they need me there? In the article, Mr. Grames was quoted saying that the school was cooperating closely with law enforcement officials, toward deciding whether and what criminal charges should be pursued.

  All I could think was, what about me? What about letting me ask Kyle directly if he had done it on purpose, who had edited that horrific video and why? Wasn’t that kind of all there was to it? I mean, this article ended by saying that school officials had “declined to identify” who would hear the case. Calls to my house were “unreturned,” and my parents were not commenting. No one was, as the case was “ongoing.” Just that word gave me the under-the-dining-room-table, seeing-if-time-stops feeling. I wondered for a moment whether my life had stopped being ongoing, and realized that even though I was living out the rest of it at the Motel Manor, alone, away from my family and story, it was still moving forward. So can someone please give me an example of something that isn’t “ongoing”? Is there something in this life that’s ever clearly, unequivocally finished? And is it just because I’m young that I have to ask that? I mean, here’s a horrible possibility: even death can’t exactly finish us. Even if I died, which would be one step closer to no life than this Motel Manor existence is, that video and this story would still live without me. My death would just be part of that ongoing tale. And maybe it’s counterintuitive, but that makes me want to come out of hiding, show everyone that I’m alive and, if not in charge of, then at least a participant in my own ongoing life.

  Today the Detroit Free Press said that Kyle and Chris and Alan have been expelled from D’Arts, but no “criminal charges are being pursued.” Being pursued! If that crappy writer had been in American lit, then Ms. Doman would have written in the margin, “Don’t use passive voice unless there’s a compelling reason.” I mean, “being pursued”? By whom? I had assumed that such charges would have been pursued by me, and that they still could be. But the paper was acting like I’m not even real, just grammatically implied.

  Maybe because I ran away and wasn’t there to explain that I find the entire thing utterly sickening and was in a coma when it happened, the world has decided that we all agreed both to have sex and then to make the video. In which case I can see why there’s nothing criminal about it. Maybe the world thinks I wanted this to happen. When I have thoughts like that, my veins freeze like the pipes in our house, right before the ice makes them explode and flood the basement. I can’t believe my parents, who I assume were involved in this “hearing” in some way, would have let everyone leave believing that.

  None of the articles I’ve seen has mentioned my disappearance. They’re not allowed to name me, or show my face, so they don’t even say I “wasn’t available for comment” or anything, although they all say that about my parents. They all complain about “calls to the family” being “unreturned.” Sometimes I wake up at night, sweating, thinking, what if my parents’ lawn is covered with tents, reporters in and out of sleeping bags, shining flashlights, peering into the windows in search of me or my parents or brothers? What if every other room in this motel is full of camera crews or something. My two small, dirty windows overlook an airshaft and garbage dump, not even the parking lot, so I can’t see if there are crowds in the front. I’ve left only twice, both times to go to Kroger, and once was my second night here, after dark, and the other time was that Saturday morning, predawn, with Bill. Maybe by now there are throngs. Or maybe I’ve just watched too many big-budget movies and real life is slower and flatter than all that. Maybe it’s just what I’ve noticed, now that I’m the object of stories I know something about, which is that reporters actually report on one another’s stories all the time, instead of coming to investigate the truth. They copy whatever everyone else wrote, and you see all the mistakes get repeated verbatim. Maybe I never noticed this when I was reading about stuff I also knew nothing about, but once you read about something you know something about, you can’t believe how slack and inaccurate most articles are. In addition to making me want to come out and set the record straight, it makes me never want to read the paper
again, since now that I know it’s all fiction anyway, why bother? I’d rather read a good book. I mean, I don’t know much about the culpability of the Catholic Church, or oil spills, or banker crimes, but now that I’ve read the stories about me and my school, I can’t imagine that reading the papers is the best way to learn much of anything about any of these other categories, either. I’m no expert, even on what happened to me, but I do know that I’m not “disabled,” and that D’Arts is not “a breeding ground for scandals among the designer-drug-addled children of Ann Arbor’s elite.” The unnamed perpetrators are also not (a) “all seniors at the elite Arts Academy,” as I’ve now read dozens of times, or (b) “childhood friends of the disabled victim,” even if “sources close to the investigation” say so.

  I’ve also realized that even though everything in the world is ongoing, or maybe precisely because that’s true, nothing lasts. The story is migrating to the back pages these days; I guess if you can’t print photos or name names, the sexy, empty headlines only grip people for so long. And there’s no shortage in America of homophobic politicians molesting their young male staffers. A super prolific one has graciously taken the front-page spotlight off of me this week.

  Mainly, what I want to know is something the media also can’t seem to figure out, which is who the “hearers” of the hearing were, what they heard and decided, and whether any of it matters for me. The truth is, I can’t know any of that without my parents. I need my parents, and I think I have to get out of here. Were they there? Was Mr. Luther? Mr. Troudeau? What about Kyle’s parents? Kyle? Chris? Alan? Who picked and how? What could they possibly have said to one another? Did those guys get to tell their sides? Sometimes, if I let myself flutter near the fire, I imagine Kyle announcing to a room full of people, including my parents, “I was drunk.” He says it in the same voice he used to tell me about his sister. But when he said that, his point was like, “it was my fault,” and when he says this, it’s the opposite, his point is, “I don’t even remember what happened and how can it be my fault, I was drunk.” The thing is, I was drunk too, and I still can’t exactly remember what happened, so maybe he genuinely feels that way too. And what I want to know is not even about the sex, really—I can guess at what happened there, and whether I said I was okay or not doesn’t seem to me to be the point. I mean, even if I said it was okay, it clearly wasn’t. Whoever created the word consent has never been videotaped doing something she didn’t mean to. What I want to know is whether Kyle is the one who edited the tape, if he was cruel enough to include that clip of my name. In my happy imaginary version of the hearing, it comes out clearly that the whole enterprise was Chris’s or Alan’s fault, and—surprise!—Kyle still doesn’t know how it happened: “When I woke up, these guys had gone through all my tapes! I had no idea they made this thing.” Or in the B version, he made the tape itself, but it was for him, a private way of keeping a record, keeping track, keeping me. And he never meant for it to get out.

  I don’t care about the expulsions, or at least I feel in my body like I don’t. Dropping out of the world has made me numb, I guess. Or maybe getting expelled isn’t a big deal. Is it? So they don’t have to go back to school? Who cares? I kind of wonder what Kyle is doing with his empty days—watching the video on an endless loop, congratulating himself ? Does he find the whole thing sexy? Or funny? Maybe not, maybe he feels bad about it, was trying to deny it or apologize for that night. Part of me, maybe the desperate, ridiculous part, still thinks he and I will have a conversation about this someday, that he’ll be able to tell me something that makes it better. Not that that makes it okay necessarily, since how could it? But at least that makes it possible that this actually happened for some reason other than he’s a monster and I’m cursed. Maybe he’s in therapy now, becoming a better person, or figuring out why he did what he did. Maybe part of his process will be to come find me someday and say he’s sorry. One of the things my mom told me that interminable day Meghan left was that the school had asked that I be “evaluated,” by a shrink, I guess. My parents and I were supposed to come in for a meeting with the school. I asked my mom if she and my dad were being “evaluated” too, and she shook her head, said, “No, I think just briefed.”

  Did Kyle’s parents get briefed? Did he get evaluated? Maybe his family has moved again, to hide another nasty crime while he finishes high school elsewhere. I have no idea what Chris and Alan are doing, but they’ve both already gotten into colleges early, so it probably barely matters for them. Maybe they’re writing new “real life story” screenplays in a coffee shop downtown, the expulsion a kind of artistic trophy or extended vacation. I’ve never met anyone who got expelled before, so I don’t know what it means. Probably they’ll all go somewhere where nobody knows what they did at D’Arts, just like Kyle already did after his sister died, if that hideous story he told me was even true. Maybe everyone knows that secret now that I told it to Sarah.

  Sometimes I think about whether those guys are scared I’ll press charges. But then I would have to talk—in public—about the whole thing. And not just that hideous night, or the video, but also the sex with Kyle—from before. I’d have to admit how it was on the first date, and then he would say it hadn’t even been a real date, that he had just offered to drive me home and I had been pathetically in love with him before that, and it would be true. Chris would be there too. He would look handsome and troubled, with his shadowy eyes and beautiful mom. She’d put both her arms around him the way she did that night at the senior voice concert, and he would return the hug in his vintage I’m-a- macho-guy- but- I-love- my-mom way, and who would possibly believe he should be locked up? To say nothing of Alan, soft-spoken rich kid Alan, with his brown arms and hair so fine it would remind everyone of a kindergarten school picture. Everyone in the world would be there, gaping at us like we were starring in yet another sordid video about my life. And the audience would know that I’m not only a slut to my core, but also a rat. And whether I succeeded or not, everyone would know that I had tried to send Kyle and Chris and Alan to jail. Now at least I have the moral upper hand, I think. And if I stay quiet, maybe it will all go away faster. Which is what I want most. Sometimes, especially at night, when I think they might be celebrating each day that passes, I want to dial 911 and shout down the wires that I didn’t agree to any of it, didn’t want any of it, that my heart is on fire and I’m actually burning down with unhappiness and injustice. I thought Kyle loved me, and if he didn’t, well, then even everything from before was an attack too.

  But, maybe because I’m me, I can always fast-forward to whatever end the fantasies come to—all of us on trial, them regretting it, their lives being wrecked, even them going to prison forever—and none of it restores my dignity, erases that video, or improves my life. Maybe that’s the conclusion my parents came to, too, and that’s why nothing criminal is “being pursued.” It’s just a guess, but a pretty good one, I bet.

  If it were true that misery enjoys company, then I guess I’d hope for those boys to be ruined, to go to jail instead of college. But somehow, maybe weirdly, it just seems like their lives being over isn’t really a silver lining for me. So maybe I’m not the kind of person who would rip someone else’s legs off to be tall after all.

  At least I have Bill. And if I ever leave the Motel Manor, I’ll have my parents back. And Sam. I miss them so much I’ve been waking up crying. I never knew that that could happen, that you could be crying before you’re even awake. I always thought the mind had to tell the body to suffer, but even my whole body is heartbroken. I miss Meghan and Sarah and Molly, even Ginger. And I want to go home. I can’t stop wondering how Kyle can live with himself after what he did. I mean, I can hardly stand to sleep at night or be awake during the days myself, but I keep thinking when I’m crying in the morning, “Get up anyway, Judy. You’re going to be okay.” Because at least what keeps me up and makes me cry isn’t something disgusting I did to anyone other than myself.